I have seen a new pattern emerge with Actifio customers. The Actifio Administrators may have the backup administrator job function, but they are seen as enterprise architects by their organization. Various teams such as DevOps, Analytics, Security and Support are increasingly relying on Actifio administrators to consume Enterprise Data-as-a-Service (EDaaS).
Let’s look into the past: Remember the days when backup admins would have to do some crazy math to determine the number of media servers, the amount of storage, the storage & n/w throughput? Remember when they had to plan which jobs to parallelize, do incredibly long restores, many such restores, alerted on weekends because of failing full backups for large databases? Those were the things that consumed a backup administrator’s daily life.
Fast forward to life with the Actifio Enterprise Data-as-a-Service platform. Actifio Admins don’t have to do the crazy math because of SLA driven incremental forever backup & instant recovery for everything – multi TB file systems, multi TB databases, NAS filers with millions of files. They can even do an instant mount off object storage in cloud.
Over time they have found that their audience, who used to ask for file\folder restores or a VM restore, has changed.
Actifio Administrators’ clientele now includes:
- The Dev & QA teams asking for virtual copies of a 10 TB SQL DB
- The UAT team asking for multiple virtual copies of a 30 TB oracle DB in their RAC environments for performance testing
- Their security team asking for virtual copies for security vulnerability patch testing, support teams asking for virtual
copies of a DB2 database to do Root Cause Analysis very quickly.
An Actifio admin would have quickly become a bottleneck if he/she has to manually serve all these requests. So they typically set role based access control in Actifio so that the right user can self service access the right virtual copy on a right machine.
Some Actifio admins have even gone as far as learning the REST APIs and have integrated into their orchestration tool such as Ansible or Chef to make virtual copy provisioning self service and event driven.
Actifio Administrators are the center of gravity of enterprises, in the thick of architecting the most important asset of an enterprise – data access at a moment’s notice, wherever it is needed. Imagine the breadth of applications, databases, hypervisor, private/public cloud, block/file/object storage that they manage using SLAs in Actifio. Isn’t this what you would expect of an Enterprise Architect?